DOJ’s Alleged Russian Propaganda Messaging Is Nearly Identical to Fox News Opinion Programming

A new Department of Justice indictment alleging a Russian propaganda scheme includes a trove of evidence peeling back the curtain on both its interests in the 2024 election — a Donald Trump victory and a Kamala Harris defeat — as well as the way it goes about promulgating propaganda in the United States. What’s more, the talking points and messaging goals Russia pushed for turn out to be remarkably similar to Fox News opinion programming.

The just-unsealed indictment accuses Tenet Media, a Tennessee-based content company with several high-profile right-wing personalities on its roster, of being part of a Russian influence operation , working to infiltrate U.S. media with the Kremlin’s propaganda.

Creators currently listed on the site and featured in videos on its YouTube channel include Dave Rubin , Benny Johnson , and Tim Pool , among others. In statements, all three pro-Trump personalities have claimed they were unwitting victims of the alleged scheme; the indictment does not say otherwise.

One of the more fascinating angles to this story is watching how Fox News has opted to cover it. Judged purely by its ratings, Fox News is by far the most influential perch on cable news, and its conservative-leaning opinion shows are a behemoth in the opiniotaiment-cum-outrage media ecosystem®.

When Fox News anchor Bret Baier initially covered the story minutes after it broke on Wednesday, it’s fair to say he downplayed its impact and cast a skeptical eye toward Attorney General Merrick Garland , who announced the indictment in a press conference warning against Russian interference in the 2024 election.

Opinion host Jesse Watters offered a remarkably skeptical view of the indictment Wednesday night, but it was a Fox & Friends segment Thursday morning that inadvertently revealed how many of the talking points being pushed by Russia are prevalent on the air at Fox News.

“The Biden administration on Wednesday accused Russia of trying to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election,” reported Fox News Digital correspondent Brooke Singman . “Now, officials say that Russia is working to target American voters through state-run media, online platforms, and U.S.-based social media influencers. So in this court filing, Attorney General Merrick Garland says that over at least the past year, Art and its employees have deployed nearly $10 million laundered through a network of foreign shell entities to covertly fund and direct U.S. companies.”

She then listed specific information campaigns allegedly directed by the Russian disinformation campaign, which included “record inflation, unaffordable prices for food, risk of job loss for white Americans, the threat of crime coming from people of color and immigrants, and overspending on foreign policy.”

Any viewer of Fox News opinion shows over the past few years will immediately recognize that the topics cited and neatly provided in on-screen graphic form are precisely the same ones featured in an everyday rundown on most Fox News shows.

Singman seemed to convey some skepticism in her reporting that the alleged propaganda cited are simple conservative talking points as a means to undermine the indictment as spurious. But this does not diminish the idea that popular pro-Trump media figures were allegedly getting super rich to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding.

The evidence outlined in the indictment reveals even more talking points Russia wanted disseminated to Americans:

Sound familiar?

This is not to say that Fox News is in the tank with the Russian government’s alleged efforts to sow chaos and division among the American public. But it does serve as a stark reminder that the conservative movement has come a long way from the “tear down this wall” moment that helped define the Reagan era to one in which pro-Trump commentary regularly attacks America, its people, its values, and its allies.

The other revelation here is that these talking points are so predictably pro-Trump that Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin would have likely made these very same points in videos without the $100,000 per video fee some allegedly cashed through Tenet Media. Ironically, that does provide support for their claims that they were unwitting victims of this scheme—or , as that’s known in intelligence circles, “useful idiots.”

Watch the above via Fox News.